kmb717 said:
Worldomoter has now added columns for Total Tests and Tests/ 1 million people. As you can see as of this morning, we are still not doing anywhere close to the amount of testing we need to be. If we want to get back to normal, the only way to do that prior to a vaccine is mass testing. And unfortunately right now, we are no where close.
To get out of the lockdowns we need to get to a point of doing Test and Trace. Dr. Fauci even said that after we get through this wave, we can avoid future lockdowns by using more specific testing and only isolating those people who have the virus or people who come in contact with this person.
To do Test and Trace, you have to test:
- Anyone who comes in contact regularly with at risk people - healthcare workers, nursing home workers, and people who work in service industries. If negative,they continue to do their normal activities.
- If any are found to be positive, you do contact tracing to find the people they came in contact with and test them. You quarantine anyone that tested positive and the rest go about their normal lives.
- You test anyone who shows symptoms. If positive, they quarantine and you do contract tracing to test everyone else they came in contact with when they may have been contagious. If any of them are positive, you quarantine them and do contact tracing on their contacts.
This is how we return to more normal lives. It is difficult to do contact tracing now due to:
- We are seeing a massive number of positive cases and people needing testing that is overwhelming the labs. This is extending the time it is taking to report on the test results.
- The rapid tests are not fully deployed yet and there are limited machines that can do the test. As such, they are currently allocated to areas of critical need.
- Current technology requires people administering the tests to where PPD which is currently seeing short supply in many areas.
Until the virus is more under control - models suggest by June/July, you can not really do large-scale Test-and-Trace. Once we do get to a point where labs are not overwhelmed, when we have tests that either do not require the wearing of PPD's (ie., self-tests where a person an swab themselves - these tests are coming), and we have more rapid test capabilities, Test-and-Trace will be possible and it must be implemented. It offers the best alternative in the absence of a vaccine.
Based on past statements from Dr.Fauci and others, it is likely the earliest we would see a vaccine is the first of next year. Quite frankly, I think this is the fastest we should expect it to be available. Developing vaccines is risky. They can:
- work in vitro, but not in animals or humans
- work in animals, but fail in humans
- fail in human testing
Failure would mean they either fail to produce the antibodies necessary to protect us from the virus or they cause complications that make them unsafe to administer. People should hope and pray we get an effective vaccine by early next year, but just realize their are risks that could delay it.
I also worry the vaccine they come up with only works for the current version of the virus, but the virus mutates. Every year, the experts try to predict the strain (or mutation) of flu virus that will be the most common version and design a vaccine around this strain, but they sometimes get it wrong and the vaccine is not as helpful as it was hoped.
There is a concern the coronovirus will mutate rapidly, creating so many strains that it becomes difficult to develop a vaccine. This is the case with the common cold which is also a coronavirus. There are too many versions to effectively create a vaccine for all the possible strains of the cold virus. We develop "herd immunity" to many versions of the cold virus mutation (especially when we are children), but there are so many versions, it is difficult to encounter them all and develop immunity.
